View from Seed

FEBRUARY 27, 2019

Analytics is about designing, reporting, and leveraging operating metrics to aid strategic and functional decision-making. These are operating metrics because they are not part of GAAP financial statements, even though they are critical for everyone from the CEO to marketers and PMs to make data-informed decision on a daily basis.

Analytics 149

Analytics Hiring SQL Forecast 149

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 2, 2018

It’s the kind of environment where people may think that concepts like business forecasting or change management are all well and good, but really the province of big businesses – not more fledgling organizations. It happens because they often neglect the forecasting and planning that helps them prepare.

Cofounder 0

Cofounder Partner Forecast Founder 0

Duct Tape Marketing

JUNE 20, 2023

12:22] Would you look at the value derived by digital technologies differently than by producing customer value or revenue? [14:23] And there's a bit of a sense that digital was a bit sort of the wild west in terms of, oh, it's all about agile and people improvise the method and you can't measure things as well.

Technical Review 66

Technical Review Silicon Valley Generative AI Arizona 66

Steve Blank

JUNE 10, 2010

With venture capital came accountability to board members, forecasts, and other people’s agendas. They were smart enough to realize that IBM’s existing processes and procedures wouldn’t be agile enough to innovate in this new market. Success for this new division meant generating substantial revenue and profit for company.

Silicon Valley 328

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur United States New York City 328

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

And so the spreadsheet is built with conservative assumptions, including a final revenue target. No matter how low we make the revenue projections for this new product, it’s extremely unlikely that they are achievable. In a startup context, numbers like gross revenue are actually vanity metrics, not actionable metrics.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

There are few courses which teach aspiring entrepreneurs the skills (business models, customer and agile development, design thinking, etc.) We’ll build the class around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. If non-web, build demand creation budget and forecast. to optimize this search.

Wiki 311

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 311

Steve Blank

JANUARY 10, 2011

The revenue plan had the new product baked into the numbers and it was clear that this division General Manager was going to crater his forecast (happens all the time, nothing new here.) The resulting conversations made us smarter, agile and relentless. They were cultural poison for a startup. Lessons Learned.

Forecast 264

Forecast Agile Revenue Founder 264

Agile VC

MAY 26, 2011

In another we decended into a debate about our 5 year forecasts (I built the models so fielded most of these questions), and it became clear they probably weren’t the best fit for our Series A round (this group is no longer in the early-stage VC business). We’ve been lucky.

Term Sheet 178

Term Sheet Silicon Valley Technical Review Social Network 178

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Get 18 months or more of cash (runway) in the business against a conservative forecast. Not just about expenses, about increasing revenue. Make sure for planned revenues you have "leading indicators" to know if you will hit it. This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart.

Lean 121

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121

ConversionXL

JULY 17, 2015

” and my CEO is saying, “Yeah, we’re agile. So you can test for a proxy metric rather than the end goal and you can test faster, but ideally you want to test for a metric that’s really indicative of your bottom line. We need to test faster.” ” So can I spot a trend? You can just say no.

Video 48

Video Mobile Conversion Audience 48

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

We were focused on revenue, but we didnt understand that revenue is not important for its own sake in an early stage company. Talking about trends is more about trying to forecast the future, like a guru, sometimes it works, sometimes not. Maybe, but the thought never even entered our minds. About spot trends. all about luck.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94

Occam's Razor

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

But each keyword gets "credit" for other metrics. The best option is to hire a statistician with experience in data modeling and forecasting. Brian Krick: Best way to measure and communicate "available demand" from available channels (social, search, display) for forecast modeling. Please see the advice above.

Analytics 94

Analytics Web Non-Compete Metrics 94